Blogger to WordPress: Need Help !

I am somewhat new to blogging and I made a blogger blog in the first week of this month, and my friends said I was quite good at blogging, So I continued. Then today I switched to wordpress, and I have a few issues unsolved:

1. Importing from Blogger:

When the blog was imported over from blogger, I noticed that it used the labels as categories instead of tags. I had one hell of a time correcting everything. Why didn't wordpress import them correctly ?

2. Visitors

I had barely used the new blog for an hour or so, and I had not linked it anywhere significant. But I still managed to get a visitor who posted a comment. How ?

3. Search Engine Optimisations

Previously, I had experimented with a blog on x10hosting with wordpress software, and it appeared in google search in 2 hours flat, without me ever linking it anywhere. Then, when I went blogger, despite many of my friends' blogs linking to mine and despite some pages with the blog's link appearing on google search, my blog did not make it to google search till date. Its all over yahoo, but not on google. How can I expect my wordpress blog with the same name as the blogger blog to behave now ?

4. Uploading files

How do I go about uploading files ? Can I use my wordpress.com blog to share software and other stuff which does not qualify as "media"(images, audio, video) ?

5. Home Page

How advisable is it to use a wordpress blog as a website ? For basic needs, is it sufficient ? Or should I run behind Joomla! For that ? I need a site for acting as a home page for some of my software.

6. Own Domain Name

I have a friend from whom I bought a domain name for a good discount. Do I need to spend any more money to get wordpress to publish to that domain name ?

7. Browsing Users

I know usernames of some people who have blogs here at wordpress. How do I use the username to find their blog ? I never figured out how exactly this site is organised.

8. Digg, SlashDot, StumbleUpon, etc

One of the reasons I didn't choose entry level paid hosting for my blog is because with a 3GB/month bandwidth blog, there is risk of a flood of traffic if the site reaches Digg or something similar. But such a thing is highly benificial if I have a site that can afford high bandwidth usage. I heard that some cheaper webhosts ban their users from having their sites put up on digg for the fear of excess system load. Is there ANY such issue in WordPress.com ?

Good lord that's a lot of questions. I let others handle some of the others.

But you most likely got visitors because categories on WordPress actually go into a system where people can find you. Blogger just has tags which relate to your blog. But if you click on any link on your WordPress blog, you'll see that it goes to a database of related stories.

You're welcome. IPs - Akismet, your spam filter, seems to know most of them. There might be a list at wiki but I'm not sure. I'd say give it a few weeks and see what happens. I don't think you'll see much spam of any sort getting through. If something does make it into comments, once you've determined it's really spam, mark as such and Akismet will learn.

BTW, if a human leaves a comment you don't like and want to delete for some reason, just delete it. If you mark it as spam, Akismet will treat that person as spam on every one of the millions of blogs using Akismet. The spam button is not for disagreements.

PS - Since you're coming from Blogger, if you're not already familiar with WordPress's policies on ads, see the ToS, click adsense in the tag cloud here in the forum and search on 'adsense' in the FAQ.

Your blogroll, by default, will have a link to wordpress.com and that's nice to leave in. I even put it in my self-hosted blog's blogroll. Also, in the FAQ, there are links on top for Buttons and Logos you can put into a text widget. Many, many choices. The footer is only editable with the CSS upgrade.